Various methods are known for transmitting location-specific information, such as traffic messages. For example, in a TMC (traffic message channel), a location is transmitted on the basis of a location code. A geographic position and, thus, also a local allocation of the message are first rendered using a location database in the receiver. For navigational purposes, digital road maps are used, in which the individual objects are characterized by their geographic location and by their street connections. To transmit any location-specific information at all to receivers which contain an appropriate database (receiver database), a coding—also referred to as referencing—is carried out on the basis of a geographic context. This referencing goes beyond the specification of geographic data, since these data are not able to exclude ambiguities. There are, moreover, deviations in the databases, for example due to various manufacturers. Therefore, to describe all these data, referencing appendices are discussed in the following.
German Published Patent Application Nos. 100 38 343.2, 100 09 149.0, and 100 23 309.0 have proposed methods which provide for a reliable referencing in systems having distributed geographic databases. Beyond the original objective of generating references among objects which are, in fact, present in two different databases, but are each described differently, the methods in the aforementioned patent applications enable geographic objects to be navigably incorporated in a database where they originally had not been present. To this end, the object, e.g., a parking garage, is supplemented by appendices, e.g., by the geometry of an access road. On the receiver side, using pattern recognition, an at least partial map matching is achieved, geometric components present on the object side and not in the database being reentered, for example as access roads.